Useful Links: Gender equity, flippa a site, Vine

The brilliant Lauren Bacon wrote a list of fantastic resources to explain What Men (and Everyone, Really) Can Do To Support Gender Equity in Tech. This includes help for conference organizers, employers, managers, team leaders, investors and just about anyone. I support what Sheryl Sandberg said to women in Lean In, but it has to be a systemic effort for things to change.

Want to buy or sell a web site? Look at Flippa.com. I learned about this site from my buddy in New Zealand, Miraz Jordan, who is selling her awesome site Mac Tips. So much good content on Mac Tips, and now someone can buy the whole site.

Vine Is the Show, and Vine Records the Show. I wrote about Vine yesterday on BlogHer and explained how disruptive I think this new six-second video app that works through Twitter has been in just 4 months. What are your thoughts on Vine?

Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content: Video from Karen McGrane

This is Karen McGrane’s talk at the BDConf in April 2012, but I just discovered it. It’s extremely important information about the future of the web and content publishing. It’s a year old, it’s an hour long, and it’s completely worth your time.

You can read a transcript at Karen McGrane’s site in Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content (video, slides, and transcript, oh my!)

Here’s how Karen McGrane introduced herself during the talk, in case you aren’t aware of how valuable her insights can be.

So I do a lot of work with publishers, mainstream publishers. I led the redesign of the New York Times a few years back. I’ve dragged more magazines kicking and screaming onto the Internet that I can count. I’ve done lots of work with Condé Nast. I did the redesigns of the Atlantic and Time Out and National Journal and Fast Company. I’m doing a little bit of work right now with Time-Life. And I really like talking about the challenges that publishers face in relation to broader content strategy challenges that lots of other organizations are going to face. Because I think publishers, they’re like the canary in the coal mine: they face some of these content challenges more acutely, they have to adapt to changes in their environment more quickly.

Karen McGrane – Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content, BDConf, April 2012 from Breaking Development on Vimeo.

I admit that part of the reason I’m so enchanted with this speech is because it says so well what I’ve been trying to say for some time in Web Teacher’s Seldom Asked Questions and Keep it Clean: Your Blog and Clean HTML.

Give the Earth a Hug Today

Energy saving tech tips for Earth Day.

It’s Earth Day. How about some technological energy saving ideas to help you celebrate the event?

  • Turn off your electronics when not in use. Save over 1,000 lbs of carbon dioxide and $256 per year.
  • Snakes at SXSW
    Unplug anything with a transformer. Even when the device is turned off, the transformer keeps using energy.
  • Instead of using a screensaver, use your computer’s sleep mode.
  • Install a programmable thermostat. There are some now that you can control with your phone.
  • If you travel frequently, there are apps to help make your travel greener.
  • Find a place in your city where you can recycle electronics instead of throwing them in a landfill where they leach dangerous chemicals.

You can find many more energy saving action items at StopGlobalWarming.org. You might want to send your photo in support of the Earth Day Network. The photo should show yourself with a sign that says “The Face of Climate Change.”

Useful Links: TED Talks, Embed video sections, XAMPP, JQuery2.0

Spydergrrl earns a hat tip and a +1 for sharing Finding Our Tribe: 75 TED Talks Featuring Geek Girls. Her post will lead you to the TED Talks blog, where you can find the list of More than 75 TED Talks showing women in science and tech.

How to embed just a portion of a You Tube video? from Digital Inspiration tells you how to specify a start and stop point for embedded video.

What is XAMPP? is the explanation you’ve been looking for.

A new version of JQuery (JQuery 2.0) is now available that supports only IE10. Older versions of JQuery still support older versions of IE.

To Underline or Not to Underline

Yesterday I mentioned at post by Dennis Lembree at WebAxe called Keep the Underline. Dennis talked about when an underline is a UX necessity. Here is his main point, with which I heartily agree:

You want an accessible, usable website? Then please don’t remove the underline on text links, particularly in the main content. Unfortunately this design trend continues on the web (and the same could be said about those awful form input labels that act like placeholders, ugh).

 

Why? For accessibility, users with color blindness or low vision may have trouble distinguishing links from regular text when the underline is missing. Also remember situational disability; links with no underline are usually more difficult to determine when using a poor monitor or when using a computer in a brightly lit environment.

Since I work with beginners, I often have the opposite problem. They want to underline things that should not be underlined.

Here’s the point for underline-happy beginners. An underline on a web page has a very specific meaning. It indicates a clickable link. When something is underlined for emphasis (or whatever reason exists in the creator’s mind) it confuses users because they expect it to be a link. Users may attempt to click on underlined words and – when nothing happens – the user will think your page doesn’t work. Users don’t understand what you’re doing and whatever you are trying to say gets fuzzed in meaning.

The user is lost, and your content will be abandoned because it doesn’t make sense in terms of web pages.

When you have links in the context of a paragraph, heading, list or anywhere outside an obvious nav bar, use the underline. But don’t underline anything that is not a link.

Useful links: Tables, Grid layout, Underlines

Accessible Data Tables has some updated info about tables at .net magazine.

CSS Grid Layout: What Has Changed? is from Rachel Andrew. These are changes since her post on the topic at 24 Ways and based on the latest W3C working draft.

Keep the Underline says Dennis Lembree and talks about when an underline is a UX necessity.

Shared Streaming – Good or Bad?

I was fascinated by a recent article in The New York Times, No TV? No Subscription? No Problem that explained how many people stream TV shows and movies to their devices using shared passwords or shared accounts on sites like HBO Go and Netflix.

the producers poster
A recent streaming choice from the family thespian

The Times article described how a group of friends all watched the premier of “Game of Thrones” on the same evening via HBO Go but only some of them had accounts there. The others were logging in using the passwords of friends.

This story caught my eye because my son and I share a Netflix account. That means that sometimes one or the other of us log in from my house, or from his house, or from somewhere totally not our own homes to watch movies and TV shows. I’ve logged with no problem in from my daughter’s house in Texas.

I often open up Neflix and get a good laugh because the “top 10 recommendations for you” are such a mashup of tastes. Netflix might recommend a Japanese anime cartoon series (my granddaughter likes these) or a macho action flick (my son likes these) or an independent drama with a strong female lead (guess who likes these).

What does this mean to the companies like HBO Go and Netflix who have a business model that depends on paid subscriptions? Do they plan to crack down on people who share accounts the way my son and I do?

According to New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham, who spoke to some of the companies,

. . . the companies with whom I spoke seemed to have little to no interest in curbing our sharing behavior — in part because they can’t. They have little ability to track and curtail their customers who are sharing account information, according to Jeff Cusson, senior vice president for corporate affairs at HBO. And, he said, the network doesn’t view the sharing “as a pervasive problem at this time.”

In fact, some companies don’t allow shared streaming, meaning two different users cannot stream music or movies at the same time. Spotify and Hulu Plus are examples of this technique. I don’t know about your household, but I can imagine families where three or four people with three or four devices in three or four different rooms of the house all want to use the same service at the same time. Restrictions on streaming would rankle in situations like this.

When my granddaughter spends the night at my house, she may be in the bedroom watching something from Netflix on her computer, while I’m in the living room watching something from Netflix on my TV. If that wasn’t possible, Netflix would really be of no use to me. The reason we can do this is because I don’t have the streaming only plan at Netflix. Digital Trends reported on howNetflix explained their policy about shared streaming, and it applies to some accounts but not others. According to this article,

The volume of devices that can access Netflix streaming is dependent on the current plan. If a Netflix user is on the 2-disc-at-a-time plan in addition to paying for streaming service, that account can access content on two different devices at the same time. However, these combo packages start at $19.98 and range up to $29.98 for four discs with streaming. Consumers also have the option of purchasing multiple streaming subscriptions to increase the number of devices that can access streaming content at an additional cost of $7.99 per account.

It also makes a difference whether you are streaming movies or TV shows.

I’m of two minds about this. If I’m paying for a service, I should be able to let my family share it with me. But I also understand that companies have to have a way to collect subscription dollars from people who use their services if they are going to survive. Would setting up higher priced accounts that allow more users to stream simultaneously be the answer for all providers, not just Netflix?

Are you using shared streaming? What’s your take on the future of this practice?

Note: This post was originally published on BlogHer.